


Discordant

by GammaOverdose



Series: All There Is To It [3]
Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Body Horror, Bruce Banner-centric, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Gen, Guilt, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, Religion, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 07:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19194718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GammaOverdose/pseuds/GammaOverdose
Summary: All he wants is some consistency.Somewhat of an expansion on the first fic in the series.





	Discordant

He's tired, he's so fucking tired. 

 

_ Shut up, shut up, shut up. _

 

Why won't they shut  _ up _ ?

 

_ They're only trying to help _ , someone in his head supplies, and Bruce doesn't care, he doesn't give a shit. He slams a fist on the table, and the men sitting next to him don't give so much as a glance.

 

He's tired of the arguments and the anxiety and the fucking pressure in his head. Thank God he's in public; thank God he can hold back on it _showing,_ but he's on edge, ready to hightail it out of here at any moment. He's sick of not being able to do anything -  _ anything _ \- without six different voices criticizing him, hurling slurs and insults to the point that none of it makes sense anymore and he just wants to throw up _.  _ He's gaslighting  _ himself _ , really.

 

They never,  _ ever _ shut up. 

 

(Really, it only  _ feels _ like it; there's days where his mind's a wasteland, where the only voice is his own, where it's  _ quiet _ . But his brain, it seems, only likes to see things as they are in the present moment.)

 

Sometimes, his hands turn a bit green, and he's not sure if it's the lighting or if it's  _ him _ . He breathes in, breathes out. Tries to let his head quiet down. Watches the color fade, and tells himself it was all a trick of the light.

 

It's  _ hilarious _ that despite it all, he still doubts any of it's real. It changes him,  _ physically, biologically,  _ changes him, and he's still convinced, somehow, that he's making it all up.

 

No, not him.  _ He _ knows it's real. He's a scientist; he's examined the evidence. It's always someone else, influencing. 

 

Or is it? 

 

Hell, it's  _ commonplace _ to have days where he doesn't even know who he  _ is _ . There's a fundamental disconnect within every aspect of his identity, and most of the time, he doesn't even have anything tangible to hold onto. 

 

Before the incident, he had his purple suits and his shelves of books and a vast collection of weird pens he kept in a drawer. Bruce has never been much of a materialist - that's Joe's forte - but sometimes it just  _ helps _ to have physical reminders that he  _ exists _ . That he's a  _ person.  _ That he's  _ tangible.  _

 

All of that's gone, now. He carries everything he owns in a bag he knows could be lost under rubble at any moment. Maybe one day he'll be okay with that. Maybe one day he'll get used to the fact that the world is constantly shifting around him, that he has nothing to hold onto for stability, not even his own damn brain.

 

It's ludicrous. Occasionally he gets fed up with angsting about his situation and all he can do is laugh. Every part of him has an anxiety level reaching into the fucking stratosphere and none of them can ever agree on anything. It's like corralling cats; He's lost count of them at this point, somewhere between Joe and Doc and Green Scar - he's still not sure if the latter isn't just  _ him _ . Aren't they  _ all _ , really, just him?

 

_ Well, that's not how this works, exactly,  _ he's reminded, and Goddamnit, he wants to punch something. 

 

He wishes he could tune it all out. Sometimes he'll blast music as loud as it will go just to drown out the voices in his head. 

 

There's a small perk of being invincible. You can never go deaf.

 

\-- 

 

There are bad days, and then there are _worse_ days. When the confusion is strong all he can do is hole up in some cave and wait it out. It's like a time bomb, and he never knows what he'll get. The pressure builds and builds and the arguments are  _endless_ and all he can do is claw at the dirt and hope  _someone_ has enough sense to hold them back from making a break for it. 

 

Sometimes it's all a haze of too many arms (clawing, fighting, _pulling_ ) and too many eyes and a mouth that stretches all the way around his face and he can _feel_ it, he can  _sense_ it, it's a prevaling feeling of  _wrongwrongwrong_ and he tries not to look, tries to pretend he's  _normal_ if only to maintain some single shred of dignity.

 

 _You'll never be normal, Banner. Look at yourself. Look at_ us.

 

_Be nice t' him, jackass._

 

\--

 

Bruce doesn't know what he believes, on a fundamental level. He thinks he'd rather just forget about it all, disappear into the Earth. 

 

But somewhere in there is that terrified little boy who still believes in God and Hell and thinks it's all his fault, everything is his fault, Momma’s dead because he's bad and a sinner and Daddy's locked away because of what Bruce drove him to do. Those are the bad nights. He's small, and red, and devilish, and it's all he'll ever be. Both weak and helpless, and guilty of every sin in the world.

 

Something in him cowers when he passes a church. 

 

Something in him  _ aches _ for it. The community. The stability. The structure. Even the facsimile of  _ love _ .

 

\--

 

There's a reason his appearance is always changing. Not just the Hulks, not just the obvious ones. It's the subtle blendings with the others, the sometimes-waking-up-and-not-recognizing-himself-in-the-mirror, the panic - or the apathy - depending on the day. Ever-shifting, ever-inconsistent. He hates it. All he ever wanted was a stable life.

 

It's a pipe dream.

 

He tells himself he accepted his fate a long time ago. But there are parts of him strewn back in time, parts of him that will never accept it. He's a freak and proud, he's a freak and he's ashamed - _you should be ashamed_ _-_ he's a freak and he really just doesn't care.

 

And God, he can't even decide if he hates it or if he's grateful for it because it helps him hide or if he just doesn't give a shit. Some part of him likes it, because he doesn't  _ deserve _ a face, an identity, the ability to be recognized as human. He's shifting bones and muscle and unnatural skin and so-disgustingly- _ wrong _ ; at least his outside matches his inside, now.

 

Some days, when he really hates himself, he'll open his mouth and his jaw unhinges like Harpy's to reveal row after row of sharp teeth, and his fingernails taper into claws, and there's jagged spines all down his back. He looks deformed, monstrous, and as the voices get louder his skin peels back and his hands twist and gnarl and he hates it, it  _ burns _ , and he  _ deserves  _ it (you're  _ shit _ , Bruce, you're vile, monstrous  _ shit _ , and this is who you truly are,  _ this _ is it) and he doubles over in pain and when he catches himself in the mirror he's unrecognizable, looking through glowing eyes that aren't his. 

 

It's only in the middle of the night, when no one else is watching.

 

He blinks, and the breath catches in his throat when he notices the Bible on the nightstand of his hotel, and something niggles at the back of his mind;  _ maybe you're just possessed _ . 

 

(He's tried exorcism before. He's tried  _ everything _ to cure himself, really. But all it gave him was a headache and a general sense of unease that didn't go away for a few days.)

 

Sometimes he'll wake up to the Good Book opened in his lap, a comforting passage highlighted, and maybe that'd be nice, if he were religious. If stories of God and the Devil bore any weight in the real world for him, if they were anything more than stories made up by humans desperately trying to understand their place in the world.

 

But evidently, he was religious last night,  _ whoever _ that was. It's not even unnerving anymore.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So this is pretty disjointed, which is kind of the point, and kind of the result of writing this in a funky headspace. I think a lot about what it'd *really* be like to have your subconscious manifest physically, especially adding a complex dissociative disorder into the mix. The comics set up a good base, but the extremes they're going to with the body horror in the current run really resonate with me, and I wanted to expand upon that.


End file.
